March 12, 2019 | What Can It Hurt to Distrust This Rally?

Rick Ackerman

Rick Ackerman is the editor of Rick’s Picks, an online service geared to traders of stocks, options, index futures and commodities. His detailed trading strategies have appeared since the early 1990s in Black Box Forecasts, a newsletter he founded that originally was geared to professional option traders. Barron’s once labeled him an “intrepid trader” in a headline that alluded to his key role in solving a notorious pill-tampering case. He received a $200,000 reward when a conviction resulted, and the story was retold on TV’s FBI: The Untold Story. His professional background includes 12 years as a market maker in the pits of the Pacific Coast Exchange, three as an investigator with renowned San Francisco private eye Hal Lipset, seven as a reporter and newspaper editor, three as a columnist for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner, and two decades as a contributor to publications ranging from Barron’s to The Antiquarian Bookman to Fleet Street Letter and Utne Reader.

Apple shares have shifted into hyperdrive, pulling the broad averages and the FAANGs right along. (See my AAPL tout below for a technical rundown.) If the rally achieves its current target at 190.33, that would represent a move of about 5% from these levels. It would also raise the odds that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and some other world-beaters will achieve their respective targets. This is quite a rally, consider the glum mood on Wall Street just a few weeks ago. Bear rallies are engineered to make us forget what was troubling the market just before stocks took off. Is this one just a dangerous deception? What can it hurt to assume that’s the case, at least for the time being?